Workers Online
Workers Online
Workers Online
  Issue No 16 Official Organ of LaborNet 04 June 1999  

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Interview

Opening Australia

Interview with Peter Lewis

Lindsay Tanner talks about new ideas, new policy and new politics in the Information Age.

 
 

Lindsay Tanner: Wired and Sound

The book's been out about four months now, have you been happy with the reception?

I've been rapt. In the media it was great because there wasn't an obsessive focus on one issue. Almost all the issues I raised got a guernsey somewhere and; over all, they focussed on the issues rather than interpreting it as an attack on the leadership or other ridiculous spins that the Liberals tried to put on it. Inevitably there's been some criticisms and that doesn't disturb me. I've spoken to heaps of forums about the issues and overall I'm pleased it's contributed to sparking up a bit more debate around the place. The online chat-room we set up with the book is going really well too. It's hard to keep up with all the issues, but there's a lot of really good ideas being generated there.

There was a time when politics was regarded as a place where ideas were formulated and fought; you and Mark Latham have felt compelled to go into print to get your ideas heard. Is that an indictment of the way modern politics operates?

I don't think so. If you go back to 1982, two shadow ministers put out books, Barry Jones with "Sleepers Awake" and Mick Young with "I Want to Work". So it's not an unprecedented move. We're in an unusual situation at the moment: it's a really exciting time; we're seeing massive transformation occurring in our economy and most western societies; people are struggling to understand what's going on; and there's enormous conflict and difficulty dealing with the impact of these structural changes. Also, you're getting more and more politicians writing pieces in opinion pages than even five years ago, so politicians are tending to be arguing their views, and not just the party line, in the media. So the books are part of a broader trend.

Both you and Latham have been criticised in the House for bringing up new ideas. Is it difficult to be in that forum and to be trying to generate original ideas?

There are inevitably some difficulties; but people get unduly carried away with what goes on in Question Time. The fact that Peter Costello makes a crack about book clubs isn't going to hurt the Labor Party, indeed the vast majority of voters never hear it. I very deliberately put my book out after the Federal Election and did everything I could to ensure that the risks associated with expressing those ideas was minimised and I don't believe that it's done the Labor Party any damage at all.

What would be the one sign from the Labor Party in terms of its policy formulation that would send you the message that they've listened to what you are saying?

That's a difficult question to answer because I don't have particular obsessions. I think something like water and areas like communication and immigration -- there are a number of different themes that I'm quite passionate about so I'd be reluctant to nominate any one theme as the litmus test.

But surely there are issues where political parties make decisions on which path they'll go down ...

It does in some circumstances, but in many cases it's a question of degree, it's a question of priority, it's a question of emphasis. In some of these issues we can say we're giving them a high priority but in practise we are only doing fairly modest things. Or alternatively, we can actually increase the intensity and focus, put more resources in, and really get serious about it. Now that's a question of degree. Using the water example, clearly we're in favour of more efficient use of water, best practise technology for irrigation, conserving our water resources and improving the environment of the Murray-Darling basin. The real test is not whether we have those objectives, the real test is how serious we are, how much effort we put into it, how much resources we put it in. It's really not up to me to be going around setting tests for anybody and I don't pretend that anything that I've put forward has that "we have got to do this now" sort of compulsion to it.

But you have advocated a shifting of the signposts for Labor policy: the opening out, the embracing of the new technologies, not resisting globalisation but trying to harness it; how far down that track do you think current Labor policy was at the 1998 election?

I think it's hard to describe in those terms. We had a fundamental constraint at the 1998 election that there was really no way around. We had only been out of government for a couple of years and the period leading up to that election was always going to be about consolidation. Our room to move on innovative policy development was very restricted because the simple question from your average voter was always going to be: well, if you're ideas are so brilliant, you've just been in government for 13 years, why didn't you do anything about it? So, we were never going to be in a position to come up with big, sweeping, visionary changes to policy in that period. There were some significant policy initiatives in spite of that, but mostly it was period of consolidation. I think the onus is now on us much more. We're at the stage of building the new policy direction, so the real test for me is what will we take to the next election and how innovative will it be?

This may sound like a shadow finance minister, but I also think we have to measure the political strength of our election commitments much more by their creativity and innovation and much less by dollars. When you look at our policies going to the next election you should be asking more: what innovate new ideas do we have to tackle problems and to do things and less: how much extra money are we going to put into that particular bucket?

Isn't that just convenient for a fiscal budget line?

No. I think the classic illustration of this was the power privatisation promise by the NSW Liberals before the state election. People who run around promising extra money when there doesn't seem to much underneath it, no logic, no rationale, no innovative way of dealing with a situation or a system, are actually going to lose votes; because they'll be seen as having no new ideas and as being economically irresponsible. I don't oppose spending money in new areas, but the focus must be on political innovation rather than cheque-book politics.

One area where a lot of corporate money is going at the moment is the development of the Internet, particular by the big media companies. There's a lot of talk about the Internet being a tool for the future, but what about Internet media policy. Do you have ideas on that?

I think we need to embrace the information economy and understand it's dynamics and go with it. Australia's got a terrible history: we were late into TV, we were late into colour TV, we were late into FM radio, we were late into cable TV. We have this history of protecting established interests, imposing constraints on consumer choice, mandating technologies, all these things that I think are the wrong way to go. We should take a very different approach to the opportunities the new technologies are presenting. Australia is superbly positioned; the penny hasn't dropped for many people yet, but for the first time in our history we are well positioned to be the world leaders of the emerging dominant form of economic activity. We are already significant exporters of education material, software, rock music, internet content. Despite the efforts of Liberal governments we still have pretty good education systems, engineering, infrastructure and the like. Distance will no longer matter, when in all forms of economic activity in the past it has been a dominant issue. English is our main language, but we have incredible cultural diversity which is great for our basic creativity. Because we're a young nation and quite an adaptable nation, we're ideally suited to this new environment. And it shows: after the US, on all measurements of IT take up, we come second.

So where do you reckon the political debates on the Internet will centre? Where do the differences between Labor and Liberal or Right and Left fall?

Some of those are yet to emerge. There's some very interesting issues about privacy for example. I noticed there's a book put out in the States recently with a guy arguing that the notion of privacy should be abolished altogether, that data tracking will wipe it out and we should learn to live with it. That's a frightening prospect, but it is an indication of the types of debates beginning to emerge. You've got questions of copyright and defamation, which all will come back to some basic values. Another issue we have to grapple with is Internet porn and how you deal with the attempt to impose a censorship regime based around movies and books around a medium which is far less controllable.

In may respects, the axis of the debate will be modern versus tradition, it's going to be optimist versus pessimist, adventurer versus risk-adverse. My argument is that Labor has to be the positive force in Australian politics. We win on optimism, we win on pursuing new ground, pursuing new ideas. If we are to adopt a stance which is reactive and defensive on these things, then we miss a tremendous opportunity economically for the country and politically for the Labor Party. So I think we have to take a very positive attitude; there's a whole lot of complex issues, but we have to get in there. And this is John Howard's Achilles Heel, John Howard oozes 1950s, he oozes fear of the future, he oozes the desire for the certainties of the past and that is a huge problem for him. If we are to beat Howard we've got to hit him where it hurts.

Does it concern you that people like the young Packer and Murdoch have already spent an estimated $100 million developing Internet strategies and that by the time the progressive forces of politics wake up to this phenomenon, it may be locked up in the hands of a few wealthy young men?

The concentration of power in the Information Economy generally is a concern. But one of the great things about the new technology is that barriers of entry are dropping dramatically. Your efforts are a very good example; you're running something that will reach the sort of people that a specialised newspaper with semi-mass distribution in the past. You are doing this on only a fraction of the cost of a hard-copy publication. And so although there will inevitably be big players and small players, the really important things about the new technology is that it is driving diversification; because barriers to entry are dropping. The US is a good example, the stories broken over the Internet by Matt Drudge about Monica Lewinsky; inevitably the share of the total market of the free to air TV stations and traditional newspapers occupy is going to drop,. It's dropping already. Traditional newspapers have dropped 25 per cent in the last 25 years and will continue to drop. With the free-to-airs, the signs are there of the inevitable decline in their strength, although the expansion of the market will ensure that they will remain fairly strong institutions, But they won't have the dominant position in people's minds and information intake that they once had. It will take a while for that transition to occur, but it will occur. So yes, I am concerned about concentration and ownership, but the new information market with interactive media and the Internet will be a lot harder to dominate. You no longer need to own millions of dollars of printing presses and TV studios to be a significant player.

It makes it harder for politicians as well. You just can't whack out a press release and expect your message to end up in everyone's lounge room, can you?

That's right. but it also opens up tremendous opportunities. One of the things I think we really have to learn to do, and I've started with the chat page connected to my book, is using this technology to communicate with people in the community outside of election periods. As politicians we have only done this through one-way mechanisms in the past. We go to the mainstream media through the press release and the papers and stations pump the information out. Secondly we work through interest groups, for instances, if we want to communicate with non-English speaking background people we go to the Ethnic Communities Council. But the mechanisms coming back the other way are extremely rudimentary; you can write a letter to your local MP, or write a letter to the Minister and you might get a reply in three months time. There is a tremendous opportunity opening up with the new technology to turn that dialogue into something more genuine and continuous, because the traditional mechanisms reach fewer and fewer people.

But supposing people take up that challenge, how could you possibly cope with the volume of information you'd inevitably get

Partly it's a priority thing and a resources thing. The average Minister's office in my observations tends to treat dealing with public inquiries and correspondence as a necessary evil and an add-on responsibility. Partly the answer is to turn that role in each office into a priority so you have systems in place and staff and resources that assume a large proportion of your work will be dedicated to ongoing communication with the general public.

In you book you mention ALP branches in cyberspace, how far off do you think that is?

There's only one thing stopping it and that's the attitude of people within the Party. I think one of the things that really comes through to me from the chatroom is that if you established an ALP branch in cyberspace, you'd have 30 new members in a week. Provided you did it well and factored in occasional face-to-face sessions, you could do it.

What would be the implications for branch stacking?

Well, none I'd say, because ultimately a person's right to vote in internal ballots would be dictated by their residence. The reality of life for the Labor Party at the moment is that a pretty large proportion of members do not participate in local branches; some have been branch stacked and they're not interested, others are too busy or don't want to go out at night, or they fund the branch boring. You give people more choice and more options and in terms of internal party ballots they'll still get one vote and nothing much changes. You could argue that if reforming these branches led to more genuine members then the bar to branch stacking goes up. The primary reason why branch stacking occurs is because there are not enough real members so the reward you get from putting in 50 stacked members is fairly high. If you've got a federal electorate with 1000 genuine members then it's pretty hard to branch-stack that because you've got to put in a lot of members. So I would argue these reforms would have their own in-built mechanisms for reducing branch stacking.

Finally: the future of the union movement in your Open Australia. Will they be there and what will they look like if they are?

Unions will be there and although I don't see unions suddenly turning the curve back upwards and representing half the workforce, I think they will continue to represent a substantial proportion . I think it will require a lot of adaptation, and a lot has already occurred. I think one step is to move away from the conscript mentality, where the union was this organisation that went around telling its members what to do. I think a lot of that change has already occurred. That was an obsession with me and my union, to get to the stage where the members were the decision-makers, not just electing people every three or four years. We made it a standard rule that any decision about industrial action or whatever, was a decision by the members by majority vote. The union's role was to advise, to lead, to negotiate, but ultimately the decision was always with the members.

There's been a culture change in that direction in the last 10 to 15 years and I think the notion of servicing members as individuals as well as members of a group is emerging. It's not easy to be a union official in the current circumstances and there are still a lot of ugly things threatening, but provided the union movement continues that process of adaptation , while maintaining focus on traditional objectives: bargaining collectively, ensuring the industrially weak get looked after, that people are protected from the risks of working life, I think unions will still play a pretty substantial role in Australian society.


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*    Want to parlay with Lindsay? Visit his Open Australia Chatroom

*   View entire issue - print all of the articles!

*   Issue 16 contents

In this issue
Features
*  Interview: Opening Australia
Lindsay Tanner talks about new ideas, new policy and new politics in the Information Age.
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*  Unions: An Educated Fightback
A visiting US trade unionist reveals how training better union delegates is the key to reversing the membership slide.
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*  Legal: A Fair Case for Free-Rider Laws
The proposal to enable unions to charge non-members a service fee for negotiating enterprise agreements is consistent with the principle of freedom of association.
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*  History: New Ideas in Labour History
See the latest from the May issue of Labour History, A Journal of Labour and Social History.
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*  International: Tiananmen Square Ten Years On
We remember the massacre and the role that working people continue to play in fighting injustice.
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*  Review: Organising Our Future - What Use the US??
A new paper looks at what Australian unions can learn from the experiences of their American colleagues.
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News
»  State Wage Highlights Case for User-Pays
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»  Labor Hire Cowboys - the NFF Link
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»  Murder Call: Charge Bosses Who Kill
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»  Braddy Bunch to Lift Contractor Veil
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»  Rural Redundacies - Redeployment Confusion Reigns
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»  Woolies Shopfitters Win Back Jobs From Body Hire
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»  Political Payback: NSW Targetted in Costello Cuts
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»  Rio Tinto Buries the Truth
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»  Child Care Campaign out of the Blocks
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»  East Timor Mercy Ship heads for Dili
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»  Fabian Society Reforms
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»  Industrial Who�s Who Head for Geneva
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Columns
»  Guest Report
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»  Sport
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»  Trades Hall
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»  Piers Watch
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Letters to the editor
»  Language is Important
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»  Kids Know Best
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»  Unions to Thank for Women's War Wages
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